TWG Tea Salon & Boutique

As much as I love desserts, I have to admit that I have avid fondness for drinks – cocktails, teas, coffees, smoothies, boba you name it. I love them all. And today I my inner tea lover is very happy because of the recently opened TWG Tea Salon & Boutique at the Emporium shopping complex.

For those of you who do not know TWG, here’s an excerpt from their website

“TWG Tea was established in Singapore in celebration of the island’s great history as a trading post for teas, spices and fine epicurean products. TWG Tea, stands for The Wellness Group….TWG Tea tasters travel thousands of miles across the globe every year, sampling hundreds of teas in search of the most desirable harvests direct from source gardens. Offering over 800 single estate fine harvest teas and exclusive blends, as well as tea patisseries and other tea infused delicacies, TWG Tea is internationally recognized as a veritable innovator with the creation every season of new varieties of tea in collaboration with the world’s most renowned estates.”

For those of you familiar with another mega tea, Marriage Frères, the TWG Tea Salon & Boutique is very similar. On the boutique side you can choose from 450 varietals of tea: you can buy loose tea by their weight, or packaged tea in beautiful tea canisters, or, if you are lazy, you can buy the tea bags as well.

On the salon side, you can enjoy the huge selection of tea hot or cold, they also have some interesting brunch sets and tea sets along with a la carte menu. (You can check out the similar menu from their HK branch here)

Personally I didn’t find anything in this set apart from the weekend in Moscow tea (green tea and black tea blend exhales a bouquet of rose petals, infused with the finest TWG Tea bergamot accented by notes of sweet almond.) to be exciting. The salad was so-so, the scone was not baked fresh, but was nicely heated through. Instead of clotted cream, whipped cream was served instead of butter (not preferred in my opinion) and it’s served with tea jelly, which I like Marriage’s better.

I also asked for a fragrant tea blend that’s good for iced tea, and was told to try a blend called fruit mountain, which was fragrant and fruity.

t’d was suggested Another dish we ordered was the egg benedict

The dish came looking very delicious and the hollandaise sauce was nice and tangy, sadly the poached eggs were probably made in advance, so the egg benedict was cold, which was too bad considering the dish was very delicious.

Also for dessert that’s included in the set, we chose to go for Singapore Surprise from the dessert cart which is a tart with creme-brulee filling and strawberries, this dessert is best suited with tannic tea since it’s on the sweeter side.

The tart came very flat, luke-warm, and not flakey at all. The ice-cream reminded me of chai tea from the spice notes.

I also bought some stuff back home including some tea bags, some packaged tea, and also tea candle (they said there’s 9 kg of tea infused in each candle!)

And some tea macarons

Despite some luke-warm dishes and overly sweet desserts, I will come back to TWG purely for their tea and the beautiful decor of the salon. I also think that considering that the salon was packed with a line and since it’s been opened only for a couple of days, things will improved immensely soon, and I can’t wait to go back to try more dishes.